The Squelch of Small Misery

The blue ink is beginning to fade into a ghostly streak across the whiteboard, a dying gasp of pigment that smells faintly of toxic almonds and broken promises. I am standing here, marker in hand, feeling the cold, damp cling of a wet sock against my left heel because I had the misfortune of stepping in a stray puddle near the water cooler exactly 15 minutes before this meeting started. It is a small, miserable sensation, a persistent squelch that perfectly harmonizes with the intellectual dampness of the room. We are here for a ‘Blue Sky Brainstorming Session,’ which is corporate-speak for a ritual where we pretend the ceiling doesn’t exist while Marcus, our department head, slowly builds a new one out of ‘no’ and ‘not yet.’

Marcus is leaning against the mahogany table that cost the company 45 hundred dollars back in 2015. He looks expectant, his eyebrows arched in a way that suggests he is open to anything, provided that ‘anything’ fits within the 5-page memo he wrote to himself at 3:05 this morning. He wants innovation. He wants disruption. He wants us to push the envelope until the envelope is just a pile of confused paper scraps. But as I write the words ‘User-Centric Feedback Loops’ on the board, I already know the trajectory of this conversation. It is a trajectory I have seen play out 25 times in the last quarter alone.

The Performance of Choice

‘I love the energy, August,’ Marcus says, his voice a smooth, practiced barrette of encouragement. I am August P., and usually, my days are spent as an elder care advocate, navigating the labyrinthine complexities of dignity and autonomy for those who are often silenced. But today, I am a consultant in a room where the oxygen is being sucked out by the vacuum of a pre-determined outcome. He crosses his arms. The idea isn’t just dismissed; it is dismantled, its parts scattered across the floor like the debris from a failed science project. Sarah, who has been with the company for 15 years and has the weary eyes of someone who has seen 35 different ‘pivots’ come and go, tries to bridge the gap. He does this with a surgical precision that is almost admirable if it weren’t so soul-crushing.

In my advocacy work, I often encounter ‘choice architecture’ that is actually a cage. We ask a 95-year-old man if he wants the blue shirt or the red shirt, while the reality is that he is being moved to a facility he never chose.

– August P., Reflection

I shift my weight. The wet sock is now cold. It’s a sensory distraction that keeps me grounded in the reality that this isn’t actually a brainstorm. It is a loyalty test. Here, in this 125-square-foot conference room, the ‘brainstorm’ is the blue shirt. Marcus isn’t looking for a spark; he is looking for us to hold the mirror up to his own brilliance until we are all blinded by the reflection.

The Need for Honest Commerce

I find myself thinking about transparency. In my advocacy work, transparency is the only thing that builds trust between a family and a care provider. If you lie about the quality of the food or the frequency of the check-ins, the whole system collapses. People can handle bad news, but they cannot handle being played. This corporate theater is a form of institutional gaslighting. It tells the employees that their voices matter, while simultaneously demonstrating that their voices are merely background noise for the manager’s monologue.

There is a profound disconnect when a company claims to value ‘authentic connection’ but operates through these filtered, controlled environments. If you want to see what actual, transparent value looks like, you have to look at places that don’t feel the need to hide behind 15 layers of middle management. For instance, when I’m looking for something tangible, something that actually performs a function without a 55-minute preamble, I look toward honest commerce. A brand like Bomba.md succeeds because it provides a direct utility-you know what you’re getting, the specs are clear, and the transaction isn’t a psychological chess match. I wish Marcus was more like a refrigerator. Reliable, quiet, and fundamentally honest about his purpose.

Killing the Unknown

I’ve spent 35 years advocating for people who are being told what to do ‘for their own good.’ I see the same patterns here. This meeting isn’t for our good. It isn’t for the company’s good. It’s for Marcus’s comfort. It’s a way for him to feel like a leader without actually having to lead through the uncertainty of a truly new idea. A new idea is dangerous. A new idea might fail, and failure is a 5-alarm fire in Marcus’s world. So he sticks to the safe, the tried, the 2012-approved. He kills every suggestion not because they are bad, but because they are unknown.

The Relief of True Transparency

As the slides flicker across the screen, filled with charts that show a 15 percent increase in metrics that don’t actually exist, I lean back and try to wiggle my toes. The wetness is still there, but now that the charade is over, I feel a strange sense of relief. The honesty of his ego is much easier to deal with than the lie of our collaboration. I think about the 75-year-old woman I spoke to yesterday who told me that the hardest part of aging isn’t the loss of mobility, but the loss of being taken seriously. We are all aging in this room, losing minutes of our lives to a digital glow and a man who refuses to hear anything he didn’t already say to himself in the mirror.

When the meeting finally ends at 11:55, I am the first one out the door. I walk past the water cooler, avoiding the puddle this time with a 5-foot margin of error. I get to my desk, take off my shoes, and peel off the damp socks. I throw them into the small wastebasket under my desk. They hit the bottom with a muffled thud. It feels like a victory. A small, soggy, 5-dollar victory. Tomorrow, I will go back to advocating for the elderly, back to a world where the stakes are higher than a PowerPoint presentation, and where the ‘brainstorms’ involve life and death rather than ‘brand alignment.’ But for now, I’m just going to sit here in my bare feet and enjoy the fact that, for the first time in 65 minutes, nobody is trying to tell me that my wet feet are actually a ‘strategic opportunity for moisture-rich growth.’